This in interesting: another MIXer, Madhusudan Rao, has just posted a Hack along a similar line: leaderboards for managers. With both, I wonder how many jobs lend themselves to such an objective display -- in this case, green (succeeding) or red (failing).
But I also get, from your title Matt, that's not the main thrust of your story. Rather, it's how IT was able to use its understanding of the way the organization functioned, combined with their ability to measure activity, that allowed them to force change from the bottom up. Of course, this also shows the tremendous power of IT in today's organizations. I recently read that up to 70% of the expected synergies in most mergers are either within IT or dependent on IT. Wouldn't be surprised if it was even higher.
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David -
Thanks for the comment. Let me add to what you just said. It's not IT that has power in the organization but those who have access to information. Of course I in IT stands for Information, so IT happens to be the information king.
We live in the age of information. According to Gartner Group, the amount of information available to people doubles every year. This means that companies lose more and more control and become hostages of IT. Companies either have to learn how to use IT as a competitive advantage, fall prey to smart IT organizations that can control them, or die or information starvation.
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Well, I think it's undeniable that companies have to learn how to use IT (or, more specifically, information) as a competitive advantage. If they fail to do that, IT will be the least of their problems: they won't survive against competitors who make better use of information.
I'm more and more confident, though, that companies won't become hostage to their own IT departments. Ten years ago, I saw signs of that during the first dotcom boom, and there was an angry backlash against CIOs and their departments in the years around 2001-2004 after the business felt hoodwinked by IT's embrace of expensive technologies that delivered little.
But since then, two interesting developments have shifted the landscape.
First is the rise of so many Web 2.0 applications that have made it easy to route around IT when it becomes a roadblock. All the free and inexpensive third-party services (whether email, stats, social media, application development) are available on the Web to any employee who wants to start up a program and can't get IT's resources. IT's first reaction was to clamp down/block/prohibit those services because they don't have control over them. But then managers can ask the reasonable question, if we can get this for cheap outside of our company, why shouldn't we? The burden falls on IT to come up with valid reasons to prevent business from moving forward or to develop something internal and better. This has had a HUGE impact on innovation, in my opinion. It's forced IT to step up its game and compete with the smart entrepreneurs who are offering competitive services, usually for very little money.
The other shift is subtler, but I think workers of all stripes are increasingly comfortable with technology, and many are able to develop their own online programs or even do a bit of coding. There's no longer as solid a line between the business people and the nerds in IT. Smart folks, especially those under 35, are increasingly comfortable in both camps. The flip side is that IT people are getting closer to the business. The more they can have a positive impact on the business -- as in your example, where they forced better hiring decisions by revealing performance metrics -- the more they are seen as integral to the company's performance and not merely folks who keep the email flowing.
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David,
You are right. I've actually seen both trends take place and I've seen IT fight back. At the end, smart IT departments always win. The major reason is lack of integration and support. When users select third party Web 2.0 / SAAS applications, they often don't realize what roadblocks they'll hit. History taught them that their IT can overcome all roadblocks, so they expect their SAAS vendor to overcome these roadblocks for them. But vendors have no interest in such projects. Consider Salesforce.com. I've seen customers invest significant dollars into Salesforce.com implementations just to find out that there's something critical Salesforce doesn't do. The response from Salesforce is often "sorry, we don't have this feature and have no intents to develop it at this point."
I've been a CIO myself and I've had to deal with this. Typically, I'd sit down with end users and show them all Pros and Cons of going with third party vendors or developing apps themselves. In vast majority of the cases, users would then abandon the idea. If they didn't, I'd warn them that I can't support third party applications not under my control. Then 80% of them would abandon the idea. If they didn't, they'd go with a third party application, hit a roadblock and come back to me.
So, IT is still powerful and will be for years to come.
Another concept to consider is the system. If users are unhappy with IT, do they have the right IT people and/or structure in place? In the right environment, users shouldn't be considering the two trends you are mentioning. IT should be a partner, not a necessary evil.
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